She’d looked at it, unable to shake the nagging suspicion that she’d missed something the first time she’d seen it. The exits were all here, the hallways and staircases, leading down to the ground floor.

Then Mike’s voice started rattling through the PA. The language he spoke was not even close to English. Before this moment, Jolie never would have guessed that Mike knew any other language at all. He sounded stiff and atonal, like a man talking in his sleep, but despite everything, she recognized his voice at once.

The bizarre, creepy words made her stomach go into somersaults and barrel rolls. Involuntarily, her eyes went back to the map, and she thought about the underground tunnel, seeing it there for the first time, right in front of her nose—

Then: the gunshot.

CHAPTER 47

47.

To Sarah’s eye, Mike’s voice on the overhead speaker had an instantaneous effect on Snow. Three syllables in, he was sitting up. Within five seconds he was on his feet, opening and closing his fists, working the circulation into his hands. Two bright streams of fresh blood leaked from both nostrils simultaneously.

Calhoun, still holding Eli and the gun, took a step back. “What’s going on?” he shouted. “What the fuck is he saying?”

This is it, Sarah thought. This is why Snow lured all of us together, for this very moment—

The floor jumped beneath their feet. Fresh smoke came gushing up from the hole in the room, along with all the noises of the hospital, streaming pipes and buzzing wires and the metallic grind of elevator cables thrashing into motion. Amid it all, Sarah saw Snow holding his arms up, drawing the chain of the handcuffs tight between his wrists. He seemed to bask in the moment, rising to his full height. Blood streamed from his eyes, ears, nose, but none of it appeared to affect him. If anything it bespoke some savage new virility, ascendancy to godhead. Beneath his shaved hairline Snow’s cranial vault illuminated vividly from within like a candled egg, and inside it she was sure she glimpsed something, the outline of another head that was so far from human she couldn’t believe it could be part of this same universe.

Hands still bound, the thing that had been Snow reached for Eli.

“Here!” Calhoun made a shrill gobbling sound, a combination of laughter and tears. “Take him!”

The smoke was getting thicker by the second. Sarah grabbed the gun, jerked it from the security guard’s shock-limp hand. Enclosed in Snow’s handcuffed arms, her son awoke with a scream.

Do this right. You may only get one shot.

Sarah pointed the pistol upward and squeezed the trigger.